For a hundred eighty days each year, fifty million kids file into a hundred thousand public schools and receive free education that costs $800 billion per year. Around half of these kids get to their school using a free bus service that costs $30 billion per year. At school, these kids receive free bathrooms, free playgrounds, and free access to gyms, textbooks, and computer equipment. If they play sports, they often receive free uniforms and free access to weight rooms and other sports equipment.

Around 90 percent of kids use the free schooling service, with the remaining 10 percent opting for a private religious school (7.5 percent) or a private nonreligious school (2.5 percent). Public school attendance is more common among kids from lower and middle income families, but the vast majority of upper income families also attend public schools.

Each year, schools serve 4.9 billion lunches to a monthly average of 30 million kids. Before COVID, in 2019, 68.1 percent of the kids were charged $0, 5.8 percent were charged $0.40, and 26.1 percent were charged the full $4.33. In the latest year, due to temporary COVID changes, the same numbers were 96 percent, 0.3 percent, and 3.3 percent, respectively.